IT'S OFFICIAL: NASA has taken us to Pluto for the 1st time

NASA TV
It's now official: NASA has successfully taken us to Pluto and beyond.

What's more, the New Horizons spacecraft collected all of the data it was designed to, giving scientists boatloads of information about Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, which they will start to receive bit by bit over the next 16 months.

Considering that the spacecraft has spent the past 9 1/2 years in the frigid conditions of outer space and still managed to operate all of its instruments flawlessly, this is an amazing achievement.

Why the announcement now? Well, it began with Tuesday morning's preemptory celebration:

Earlier Tuesday, NASA could be seen cheering in ecstatic celebration as its 9-1/2-year mission to Pluto came to a close at 7:49 a.m. ET. At that time New Horizons was expected to pass within 7,600 miles of Pluto, making history as the first spacecraft to reach the dwarf planet.

But it wasn't until later Tuesday night that the New Horizons story could be written in stone.

Worth the wait

Even while cheering, the team behind the mission knew Tuesday morning's celebration was preemptory.

The last photo New Horizons took of Pluto before its closest approach Tuesday.NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI
The true ceremony would come at 8:53 p.m. ET, when NASA would finally discover whether its spacecraft was still in one piece.

During New Horizon's flyby, its instruments were too busy collecting loads of data on Pluto, Charon, and the rest of the Plutonian system to signal to Earth whether the mission was going smoothly.

So the New Horizons team would have to wait until the spacecraft was done collecting data to free up some time to finally phone home. And then it would have to wait another 4 1/2 hours for that signal to reach Earth.

About 99% of the scientific data the spacecraft has gathered has not been transmitted to Earth — it's still stored on the spacecraft. So if something were to go wrong, nearly all of the precious data, which scientists hope to study for the next 16 months, could be lost.

Despite this possibility, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, Alan Stern, showed a cool demeanor throughout the day, saying there was only a two in 10,000 chance of something going wrong, such as a collision with a tiny particle of space dust.

By way of comparison, your chances of getting attacked by a shark are about one in 11.5 million. Needles to say, the mission was not entirely risk-free.

So the day has been one of brief celebration followed by lots of nervous waiting around.

Final confirmation and the future

At 8:30 p.m. ET, NASA began streaming live coverage of the wait for the critical message of confirmation. Sure enough, it was on schedule, and it even arrived a few seconds early, reaching Earth at 8:52:37 p.m.

Thierry Lombry
The atmosphere in the mission operations center at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory was very different from the morning's, as the New Horizons Mission Operations Manager, Alice Bowman, collected the spacecraft's status report and announced it to the rest of the team, concluding with the best words it could have hoped to hear:

"We have a healthy spacecraft. We've recorded data of the Pluto system, and we're outbound [from] Pluto," she said with a huge grin. "We did it."

While there was still an outpouring of celebration, there was also a huge sense of relief.

It was finally official: NASA had made the trip to Pluto.

But the story doesn't end there. Now the New Horizons team will convene to assess whether the spacecraft has enough fuel left to explore even farther into the solar system, beyond the orbit of the planets and into an unexplored realm called the Kuiper belt.

Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, a thick band containing more than 10,000 objects that wraps around the outer edge of the solar system beyond the orbit of the planets. Scientists think the Kuiper belt harbors relics of the early solar system that were first formed more than 4 billion years ago and haven't changed very much since.

The New Horizons team hopes to fly its spacecraft by one of those objects to gain a better understanding not only of the object itself, but of how the entire solar system — including Earth — formed so many years ago.

This isn't the last we've heard from New Horizons. In fact, it's just the beginning.